Guide · For directors and administrators · 25 minutes

Director's setup guide

How to take a brand-new RoundUp account and turn it into a center that runs. Work through it in order — each section depends on the one before it, and doing them out of order is the most common cause of a messy first week.

Last updated: September 1, 2026 · Print this guide

1. Before you open the app

Twenty minutes of gathering now saves a week of half-finished setup later. Have these in front of you:

• Your license number, licensed capacity, and the age range for each room
• Your state's staff-to-child ratio table for the ages you serve
• A current roster: every child, birthdate, room, and start date
• Guardian names, emails, and phone numbers — the emails especially
• Your tuition rates, including part-time, sibling discounts, and subsidy arrangements
• Current family balances as of the date you plan to cut over
• Your staff list with roles and which rooms each person works in

2. Center details

Start in Settings → Center. This is what appears on invoices, family emails, and compliance exports, so use legal names where they matter.

• Legal center name, and the display name families see if they differ
• Address, phone, and the email families should reply to
• Operating hours and days, plus closure dates for the year
• License number and licensing authority
• Time zone — get this right before any attendance is recorded

3. Classrooms and ratios

Create one classroom per physical room, not per age group, unless the two happen to match. Teachers navigate by where they stand.

• Room name as staff actually say it — "Ladybugs", not "Preschool B"
• Age range and licensed capacity for the room
• The ratio rule that applies, from your state's table
• Which rooms mixed-age grouping is allowed in, and the rule that governs it

Once ratios are set, every room shows a live count against its requirement, and out-of-ratio periods are recorded rather than discovered later. If your state's rule is unusual — a nap-time exception, a mixed-age formula — set it up with support rather than approximating it. An approximate ratio rule is worse than none, because people trust it.

4. Staff accounts and permissions

Staff sign in with their work account through your identity provider. RoundUp never holds their password, which means offboarding someone in your directory removes their RoundUp access at the same moment.

• Connect your identity provider (see the Okta setup guide or contact support for Microsoft Entra ID)
• Invite each staff member and assign a role
• Assign classroom access — teachers see their rooms, directors see the center
• Restrict billing and family financial data to the people who need it
• Have every person sign in once, before go-live, and confirm they land in the right room

5. Children and families

If support imported your roster, this section is a review pass. Go child by child — it is tedious once and painful forever if skipped.

• Name, preferred name, birthdate, room, and start date
• At least one guardian, with a working email address
• Allergies, medical conditions, and medication authorizations
• Emergency contacts and authorized pickups
• Media permissions set to match what the family actually signed — these are five separate settings (photos, video, sharing with other families in the classroom, use outside the center, and family downloads), each of which can carry a start and end date
• Immunization records uploaded, with due dates where your state tracks them

6. Tuition and billing

Set up billing before you invite families, so the first thing a parent sees in their account is a balance they recognize.

• Create a tuition schedule for each rate you charge — full-time, part-time, by age group
• Add recurring fees: supplies, meals, late pickup
• Set up discounts — sibling, staff, employer partnerships
• Enter subsidy arrangements and who is invoiced for what portion
• Connect payment processing (Stripe) and run one real transaction to confirm it works end to end
• Enter opening balances as of your cutover date and reconcile the total against your current system

Reconcile the total, not a sample. If the two numbers do not match exactly, find the difference before go-live — a balance discrepancy discovered by a parent costs more than one found by you.

7. Forms and documents

• Upload your handbook, policies, and any document families sign at enrollment
• Build the forms you collect — photo release, field trip permission, medical authorization
• Mark which are required at enrollment and which renew annually
• Set expiry tracking on anything with a date: immunizations, physicals, authorizations

Expiry tracking is the quiet win here. Instead of discovering a lapsed immunization record during an inspection, you get a list of what expires next month.

8. Inviting families

Only once everything above is done. Invitations are hard to un-send, and a parent who logs in to a half-built account forms an opinion you then have to change.

• Confirm staff are trained and comfortable — parents ask teachers, not the office
• Send a short note first: what changes, when, what they need to do
• Invite one classroom, wait a day, confirm logins are working, then invite the rest
• Watch for bounced invitations and chase those families directly
• Have a named person answering family questions that week

9. The first invoice run

1. Generate the run in draft

   Do not send. Generate the whole cycle and leave it in draft so you can look at it.

2. Reconcile against what you would have billed

   Compare the total, then compare every family whose arrangement is unusual — subsidies, mid-month starts, sibling discounts, part-time schedules. Those are where a misconfigured rate hides.

3. Fix the schedule, not the invoice

   If an amount is wrong, correct the tuition schedule and regenerate. Editing the invoice by hand fixes this month and leaves next month broken.

4. Send, then watch payments for 48 hours

   Confirm payments are landing and receipts are going out. Card declines in the first cycle are usually stale saved cards, not a configuration problem — but check the first few yourself.

10. Your weekly rhythm

Once you are live, this is roughly what running the center in RoundUp looks like week to week: